


i am the hero of the story

by recycledstars



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Drug Abuse, F/M, Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 05:18:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2800982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recycledstars/pseuds/recycledstars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a story about MacKenzie McHale and bowling, about how she finds herself in sweatpants in a bowling alley and about how one day she gets her perfect game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i am the hero of the story

**Author's Note:**

> I know what you were thinking: _wow, that finale was so uplifting, so joyous, everyone was so happy ... what I need now is some soul-crushing angst._ Well my friends, never fear. I am always here to hook you up. 
> 
> This is possibly the darkest fic ever written involving bowling. **Trigger warnings** for tangential references to self-injury and suicidal ideation and mention of sexual assault in the military as well as very explicit references to use of OTC medication in a way this author does not endorse. 
> 
> Title is from [Hero by Regina Spektor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAEnhJhZj3k). Writing playlist-slash-soundtrack [here.](http://8tracks.com/recycledstars/don-t-need-to-be-saved)

_i’m not sad but the boys who are looking for sad girls always find me. i’m not a girl anymore and i’m not sad anymore. you want me to be a tragic backdrop so that you can appear to be illuminated, so that people can say ‘wow, isn’t he so terribly brave to love a girl who is so obviously sad?' you think i’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? i’ll swallow you whole._ \- Warzan Shire ([x](http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Mother-Give-Birth-Mouthmark/dp/1905233299/ref=tmm_pap_title_0))

 

It's an accident really. It's just that the bowling alley is the closest place to the shrink's office that serves alcohol before noon.

Six sessions, mandated by HR. For the first five she spends the entire metro journey as an artist, hollowing out truths to create lies that sound much prettier.

Mac has decided she likes trains, the way they rock her back and forth. They’re loud and crowded in peak hour and she thinks they probably should put her on edge but there’s something comfortingly _Western_ about them. Warzones aren’t renowned for their public transit. And the stops are all ordered and predictable, she can count them down and knows which one is coming next.

It’s 9 AM on a Monday so she has to stand, weight shifting from foot to foot crammed between interchangeable bureaucrats in cheap suits. They knock into each other, elbows and hard angles, and it’s an oddly intimate way to be surrounded by strangers. One of the men is wearing her father’s cologne.

She feels less alone.

 

 

Men always want to fucking save her. She sees what they see when she looks at herself in the mirror: she can paint her face and fix her hair and choose her clothes so carefully but she can see the story. She looks like a walking tragedy. She’d ask the follow up too.

But she’s sick of hero complexes and people who want to put her back together as if she needs the help, as if she needs putting back together at all. Like she needs a saviour when what she really needs is to catch a fucking break.

The shrink wants to save her, which isn’t all that surprising. Ironically she doesn’t think he’s particularly self-aware about it.

It irritates her, but it's easier to keep the appointments than it is to complain to HR. And it keeps her from having to tell the story to someone else.

She'd really like to never tell it again.

 

 

The last appointment is the day after she gets fired but she keeps it anyway because that's what she's _meant_ to do.

(Never mind the fact that she’s spent her entire life doing what she was _meant_ to do – cheating on Will aside – and all that it lands her is two drinks down in the middle of the day in a bowling alley on her second game with a zero score.)

She keeps the appointment and she has to talk about her job prospects or lack thereof and at that thought, the thought that she now has all this time and nothing to fill it with except her thoughts, she starts to cry.

(Distraction has always been her armour, she keeps _moving_ , and now there’s nowhere to move _to_ , MacKenzie vs. life, check-fucking-mate.)

Suddenly she’s talking and talking and talking and she didn’t even realise she had that much to say about it. For _that_ she’s rewarded with a prescription and another appointment next Monday that she’ll have to pay for herself.

So she wanders into the bowling alley and orders a drink at 10:30 in the morning and jumps so sharply that she spills it everywhere when a small child bowls a strike.

She breathes, too shallow and too fast, for a full five minutes and she knows that things are bad because she finds herself feeling a kinship for the skittering pins, knocked over and set upright and knocked over again.

 

 

Mac decides she’s going to bowl a perfect game. A plan that, she’ll acknowledge, might be slightly informed by two pints of Guinness but that doesn’t mean it’s not a stroke of genius. (Imperfect pun very much intended.)

She’s just received another call from an old friend in London. Nothing there either. So it seems to her that she might as well meet this unemployment thing head on.

 

 

It'd be fine really, if there was a _reason_ for it, her feeling this way. And _yes_ , she was stabbed. But that was four months ago and she was _fine_. Hardly thought about it at all. It was an annoyance more than anything else, being told to slow down while she recovered. She'd wanted to go back to Afghanistan as soon as the medically mandated six weeks were up, but it was made clear that _that_ wasn't an option.

Ever since then her life has felt like something that should be happening to somebody else. Not her. Like it's slipping through her fucking fingers even though it shouldn't be.

She's MacKenzie McHale. She's not unemployable, not the sort of person who drinks in bowling alleys in the middle of the day. She's smart and successful and she _believes_ in things, in people, in change, in the fucking news.

For four months she was _fine_ right up until she wasn’t, until _now_.

With no job and no prospects she has nothing to do except watch all five and a half hours of the BBC's _Pride and Prejudice_ twice, pretend she's reading Proust and run too far, too fast, too soon until her side hurts.

And think.

God there's so much time to fucking think about everything and that's the last thing she wants. She's been covering war zones for two years just so she didn't have to think about it, which had seemed like a good idea at the time but now there's so much more than a garden-variety break up to think about.

She’d still be fine if she didn't have to dwell on all her plans falling through, her house of fucking cards toppling over at the slightest of breezes. (Brian _fucking_ Brenner and after _six years_ she should have learned _that_ lesson long ago.)

Perfect guy, perfect job, perfect resume (because she looks far more impressive on paper than she feels) and then she went and fucked it all up and now it's three years later and she can't sleep at night.

That makes it worse, the thought that she did it to herself. All of it, no end in sight.

When she thinks about the future it's a crushing weight on her chest and she has no idea how to make it into what she wants. Actually she doesn't even know _what_ she wants anymore. She thinks it's entirely possible that she never really did.

So yeah, maybe there are some demons she's been running from for a long time. That was working for her. She's angry now that it's not, now that the one tried and true coping mechanism she developed as the child of a diplomat has failed her and she's stuck confronting it all.

 

 

CNN, in a fit of kitsch, had their Christmas party at a bowling alley one year. She'd resisted, because there was _no way_ he was getting her out of her heels into rented shoes.

She remembers it, being dragged forcibly and _laughing_ –

She knows, deep down, that she hasn't forgotten how to laugh, that saying she has would be being dramatic. Deep down she knows she's going to be fine even if she’s having trouble believing it lately, MacKenzie McHale, tough as nails, one day she'll peel off this skin and be herself again.

Lord knows she wants out of it. Her forearms itch sometimes and she's scratched them raw on more than one occasion but it doesn't help. The itch just moves to her stomach and she'd have to turn herself inside out to be rid of it.

And she's never thought about that. Well. Not really. Not beyond digging her fingers into her surgical scar and wondering what it would be like if the protestor had done a better job.

She says protestor even though it’s an imperfect choice of words. The official reports probably call him a militant but she doesn't think he was, just a scared kid caught up in a violent world and what she's learned over the last two years is that they all are.

 _The world destroys us all exactly the same. But those that will not break it kills._ She knows it’s Hemmingway even though she has the sense she’s misquoting.

She spends weeks chewing her lip over the correct wording until finally it comes to her, after Charlie Skinner offers her a job:

_The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places._

 

 

She _remembers_ it, being dragged forcibly and laughing, Will saying he’d help her when she protested, citing her lack of skill.

That was mostly an excuse to be close to her. They were trying so hard to pretend they weren't together and failing, almost as badly as they were failing at tandem bowling.

It was such a dive, a converted warehouse in an up-and-coming part of Brooklyn, still seedy enough to be considered edgy. And the drinks were cheap but well made.

(Now it’s probably intolerably trendy.)

The bathroom was old, yellowing, stained, with writing all over the walls. She dragged him into it anyway, whispered it in his ear after their sixth gutter ball because she _loved_ the look on his face whenever she said anything particularly explicit. Surprised and slightly scandalised, like he still thought she was a saint no matter how many ways they found to commit cardinal sins.

Her dress was green. It was a carefully selected ensemble, skirt loose enough to hike up, proper stockings not tights, so flimsy they left her legs and naked upper thighs _freezing_ in the cold but it was worth it for the warmth of his hands, impatient, splaying her legs and he had one hand on his collar tugging until he kissed her and one hand inside his pants.

She’d been thinking about it all night, more interested in this particular game than any other, so she was trembling with anticipation, right up until she was groaning at the contact. It was uncomfortable really, faucet digging into her back, her head was drumming against the mirror, but it was exhilarating and she was lost in it and he was telling her he loved her over and over.

(She wishes she didn't remember him so vividly. Three years and if she closes her eyes she can _feel_ his hands on her. It's a cruel trick and her mind won't stop playing it whenever she thinks of him. So she tries not to think of him at all and that was a lot easier when she was being shot at halfway across the world.)

 

 

Some days she'd really like to give up, to just _not have to do it anymore_. She sleeps all the time but she's tired. And then she doesn't sleep for days. It feels like her bones grind whenever she moves her limbs.

But there's just this part of her, wide-eyed, hopeful, naive and optimistic. There's this part of her that's perpetually sixteen, perpetually on the verge of something, changing the world, finding bliss.

She's never been able to shake the idea that things can be _better_.

( _We can do better_ she'll tell him. _It's not, but it can be_.)

There's good everywhere, if only you know where to look.

Lately she sees this kind of tragic, exquisite beauty in all things. Dust motes catching the late afternoon sunlight; she should be awake by now but everything is gold and isn't that nice? Black dirt clinging to her gloves, because she's trailing her fingers along fences like a child while she walks, even though she’s not going anywhere, even though it’s a bitter winter. Ordinary days and ordinary people and no gunfire, no Soviet landmines, no roadside IEDs.

She's probably going mad, has a detached sense of how nonsensical it all is as it rattles around inside her head.

But she watches school children jump over cracks in the sidewalk and there's just this part of her that could never give up, this part of her that doesn't know how.

 

 

Nothing happened to her and she felt lucky. Like that wasn't to be taken for granted. Which was beyond fucked up but none of them did. In the Green Zone, Elizabeth took her aside and said _be careful_. Of where you go, of who you trust. Treat everywhere like an abandoned parking lot in Queens in the middle of the night.

(Her name was Torres, but Mac always called her Elizabeth, the secret handshake in their small rebellion against the patriarchy and she'd never been that kind of feminist before but when someone takes you aside and says _mind the rapists_ you change your fucking tune.)

She had wanted to do a story on it before their show was cancelled. Her news director had said no.

Nothing had happened to her so she felt _guilty_ , being wary of men who showed too much interest in her.

The bowling alley served alcohol before noon so there were a certain number of them, regulars, ageing alcoholics that leered and commented sometimes, _you're not so great at bowling sweetheart but I reckon you'd be alright at handling these balls_. Zero points for creativity.

She ignored them until one day someone reached out and grabbed her forearm. _Hey, what's the matter with you honey, I'm fucking talking to you here._

She'd spent six months with Special Forces, she could drop a man twice her size, especially with the element of surprise. Because he hadn't been expecting her to fight back, throw her weight behind her arm and have it up against his throat.

 _Touch me again and I'll kill you._  
  
Promise, not threat. He knew she meant it too. Which was good, because she did. She was fucking sick of feeling scared.

Still, the week after _that_ she stopped wearing jeans.

(And the week after that he'd apologized, told her his life story, _wife left with the kids after I lost my job_. She's always had a habit of collecting people's stories, journalistic compulsion, and his was sad and a little pathetic. But they'd ended up in the same place at the same time while she listened to him tell it, so maybe hers was too.)

 

 

She's always been a little Type A, more in theory than in practice because when it comes down to it she's just not very good at being a perfectionist even if she's always had her tics. (Even numbers and straight lines and colour co-ordinated stationery and having all the right answers in school, that sort of thing.)

Her entire life becomes about control though, and her fucked up little night-time routine:

8:00 PM – Pretend she's not watching _News Night_ by flipping through the channels every five minutes at rapid pace then lingering on Will, who is far more capable than he's decided to pretend he is. Resent him a little, for throwing away all the things they talked about in bed, before he was doing the news in primetime.

9:00 PM – Take her first dose of Ambien because she’d just like to sleep, for once. Wash face, clean teeth, floss, because in the fog after he left her she had decided that dental hygiene was the cornerstone of her admittedly illogical strategy to win his forgiveness. Years later and it's still a habit but she hasn’t been forgiven. Get into bed and pretend she's reading something worthy of Cambridge scholar.

9:30 PM – Give up and read something she'd never, ever keep on her bookshelf.

10:00 PM – Turn out the light and lie awake.

10:30 PM – Take a second dose, because the first isn’t working and it hasn’t killed her yet.

11:00 PM – One more wouldn't hurt.

12:00 AM – Wonder how the _fuck_ she’s still awake. Take another pill and try not to think that this is how Heath Ledger died.

Sometime after that she falls asleep.

Some nights she wakes up from nightmares too drugged to turn on the light so she just curls up and shakes for a while. Some nights she sleeps on the bathroom floor because the cold tile is comforting and she thinks she's going to be sick.

(After a while she starts leaving the lights on. It’s easier.)

 

 

Every second meal is cereal because all she has to do is pour it into a bowl and remember to buy milk. She’s exhausted by the mere _thought_ of using her kitchen for anything else.

And she can stomach it. She wakes up feeling nauseous most days.

 

 

DC is much quieter than Manhattan so when the apartment gets so silent she can hear herself thinking she goes out.

(She used to have the news on constantly, but she's stopped caring all that much what happens in the world, same parade of human misery interspersed with ratings-seeking bullshit. So it turns out she’s not immune to cynicism after all.)

Mac takes it upon herself to become the patron saint of pity sex, of lonely men who are still in love with ex-girlfriends and ex-wives. It's easy common ground. They can have nothing else to talk about, and she hardly ever says a word about herself, but they understand each other.

MacKenzie McHale's lonely fucking hearts club. Take a number, take a seat.

It's safe because there's no chance they'll fall in love with anything other than the idea of her and they're so desperate to be saved they don't notice that she's drowning too and they're so fucking _grateful_.

She likes it that they want her more than she wants them.

 

 

Charlie Skinner offers her a job. She gets up from the bar and tries out his advice and bowls a thoroughly average game.

Then, impulsively, she calls the _Lunch_ people and tells them she can’t start next Monday anymore because something’s come up. Even though she hasn't decided yet, whether or not she'll take him up on it.

 

 

She dreams about him, talking in innuendos about cars, most of which she doesn’t understand but there’s _slick_ and _faster_ and then he shuts the fuck up, mouth on her and nobody has ever done _this_ like him. _Will has a whole gear you've never seen_ , her hands in the sheets.

Tongue agony (sweet, sweet agony) and she's biting back please, teeth so hard in her lip thinking she will not beg him even has her whole body trembles with it, with _oh please, oh please, oh please_.

He's holding her thighs apart and she'd dearly like to slam them closed around his face and just hold him where she wants him but he resists her, gripping tighter. She needs _more_ , fingers as well as tongue, and she’s just about to tell him that when she jolts awake.

(She wishes she didn't remember him so vividly. But it's nice, she supposes, to know she's still capable of feeling desire, of wanting. Lately she hasn’t wanted much of anything. It'd be nicer still if after three years what, _who_ she wanted wasn't the ex-boyfriend who definitely doesn't want _her_. But hey, one long overdue step at a time.)

 

 

The trip to Chicago isn’t just for him, it’s for a funeral and her collection of black dresses is growing to rival that of a Victorian widow. There are two kinds of funerals in her now considerable experience: the ones that make her desperate and the ones that leave her hopeful. Sometimes grief leads to despair but sometimes to closure and this time it’s the latter.

So she goes to Northwestern, makes sure he’s asked the question. She recognises something in the girl who asks it, remembers that kind of hope, still has it somewhere in her, knows what the answer is.

She writes it down for him, chasing normal, heart racing but it’s not fear, just excitement. For the first time in months she feels right again, so close to how everything is meant to be.

She finishes Don Quixote as her flight lands in DC.

 

 

On the Monday before she leaves she goes back to the bowling alley, properly dressed, says goodbye to all the regulars. They goad her into playing and it’s not her perfect game but it is her best so far:

 _It’s not, but it can be_.

 

 

It turns out she was right all those years and things really do work out in the end.

She leaves the bigger picture behind her every night, now that they’ve created a small picture of their own. Mac thinks she understands much better now, how the world works, why she’s always seen an interminable beauty in all things. People are little tiny pieces that all fall into place.

That’s the thing about the future: she was always afraid of it, not knowing how the pieces would fall. But the things that make her happiest are the things she never would have thought to want. And life, which can be nearly impossible at times, is so full of unexpected joys.

(In the fall she watches school children, _her_ children, jump over cracks in the sidewalk and there’s just this part of her, that never forgot how to hope.)

They end up in a bowling alley in Brooklyn, much brighter than that one from so many years ago. They end up in a bowling alley in Brooklyn surrounded by seven year olds, and the things that make her happiest are the things she never would have thought to want.

(Her seven year old son, blowing out the candles and then, unable to keep his birthday wish to himself, whispering it, sticky, in her ear. Will with their suddenly shy five year old wrapped around his neck. And the absolute certainty that she has frosting in her hair. She has no idea how they managed something this close to normal.)

Most days she forgets, even the scar doesn’t remind her. She has new ones now anyway, children wreaking havoc on her body. (She’s forgiven them. Mostly.)

The clatter of pins hitting hardwood floors reminds her though. So she takes a moment in the bathroom, alone, stares at herself in the mirror and doesn’t see any of what she used to see.

(She’s still tired, and so much older, but she doesn’t look miserable anymore.)

It still feels like it happened to somebody else and maybe it did. It's been so many years and they say she's shed her skin entirely since then, no clawing out of it required, just the slow fade to dust.

So she takes one breath, then two, and somewhere between streamers and balloons and birthday cake she bowls her perfect game.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry. I never write Mac that traumatized. I feel bad. Tbf, Sorkin started it. [Related meta and a lotta character analysis here.](https://littlebitsofmad.livejournal.com/1570.html)


End file.
